I Imagine You Imagining

Looking for you. Looking to see you, touch you, taste you, hear you, smell you. I imagine you imagining all this. All that I know. Except my choosing. My choice to accept your love, for example. My choice to love. And this is what you discover when you imagine me. This is how you let me surprise you. Delight you. Maybe.

But after all, you imagine this also. All imagination is discovery.

I imagine you imagining me imagining you. Imagining your universe.

You are working all the time at this. It brings you pleasure but much pain. It brings you joy to spin us out of your immaterial material heart and mind. To make us and all that is about us. All that is not us. All that we are coming from and going to.

I remember a reverend in boarding school. A Ph.D. railroad economist turned Episcopal priest. Then hired into the school I was attending. Telling me my understanding of you was pantheistic. Telling me I was a pantheist, not a Christian. Telling me I had an improper. An incorrect. A heretical idea of you. He took delight in this.

I was fifteen. And he enjoyed cutting me. Cutting me down and casting me out. Casting me into outer darkness. I remember it. Like it was just this past weekend. He smiled a dazzling smile and turned his back on me. He was always smiling.

I became an atheist after that. I wandered for decades without you. Not knowing to look for you. Not knowing you are everywhere around here. All around this life.

I thumb my nose at that Episcopal priest. I imagine you thumb your nose at all such priests as well. At all those who would limit you and your Kingdom. You and your presence. You and your power. You and your work. Your making.

I thumb my nose at all those who would reduce you to a neat set of doctrines. A neat set of precepts. A set of ideas about you that keep you uninvolved. Unintegrated. Aloof. Apart. Imaginatively dead to this world.

I imagine you as a poet, not a systematic theologian or a designer. Not a logician. (You delight in confounding logicians.) Not a watchmaker. (You delight in a universe that is infinitely indeterminate.) Not a designer of machines.

I imagine you writing the story of the universe. The one verse. And as you write your story, we emerge from it. You discover us. You are delighted as we emerge from your words. From the work you are making. From the literal DNA and figurative DNA that you are spinning out. Spiraling forward through the infinite present. The always now.

We, among other things, are the work you are making.

We are made up. Fictions. Actual true-life fictions. Creations out of your mind.

Characters in your verse play. Your comedy. The original divine comedy.

And this comedy evolves. This comedy has many acts. Many ages. Along the way, you make many marvelous, beautiful things. You make the stars and the galaxies. You make the moons and the planets. You make the creatures of every kind.

You are deeply involved. You are profoundly present in everything. But you create everything with a common set of semantic and syntactical rules. With certain conventions. You create everything in an idiom that is purely yours. That is unmistakable because everywhere in the making there is beauty. Everywhere in the making there is a liveliness. A loveliness. A grandeur. An imperfection. An immediacy. An urgency. That is striking. That is overwhelming.

Because this is of you. Because you have imagined it. And are. Because you continue to do so. Not because you are bored. Not because you haven’t anything better to do.

You do this because you love making. You love creating. You love discovering what will emerge next into the nexus of your love.

And so I think of Psalm 148. I am always thinking of Psalm 148. Everything you make is grateful. It is alive, after all. It is made and enjoys the astounding loveliness you are making. Enjoys its participation in the Kingdom that is becoming. That has come and has yet to come. That is overwhelmingly possible. Now. And now. And now, again.

Everything enjoying what emerges as the writing moves forward. As the story unfolds. As we together imagine you more and more clearly. And are able to see you more and more clearly. Hear you. Touch you. Smell you. Taste you. More and more of you. And what you have made.